berforce then said to Colenso: "You need boldness to risk all for God; to stand by the truth and its supporters against men's threatenings and the devil's wrath; . . . you need a patient meekness to bear the galling calumnies and false surmises with which, if you are faithful, that same Satanic working which, if it could, would burn your body, will assuredly assail you daily through the pens and tongues of deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance of a zeal for Christ, will evermore distort your words, misrepresent your motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and seek by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy your powers of service."[1]
Unfortunately, when Colenso followed this advice, his adviser became the most untiring of his persecutors. While leaving to men like the Metropolitan of Cape Town and Archdeacon Denison the noisy part of the onslaught, Wilberforce was among those who were most zealous in devising more effective measures.
But time, and even short time, has redressed the balance between the two prelates. Colenso is seen more and more of all men as a righteous leader in a noble effort to cut the Church loose from fatal entanglements with an outworn system of interpretation; Wilberforce, as the remembrance of his eloquence and of his personal charms dies away, and as the revelations of his indiscreet biographers lay bare his modes of procedure, is seen to have left, on the whole, the most disppointing record made by any Anglican prelate during the nineteenth century.
But there was a far brighter page in the history of the Church of England; for the second of the three who linked their names with that of Colenso in the struggle was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster. His action during this whole persecution was an honor not only to the Anglican Church but to humanity. For his own manhood and the exercise of his own intellectual freedom he had cheerfully given up the high preferment in the Church which had been easily within his grasp. To him truth and justice were more than the decrees of a Convocation of Canterbury or of a Pan-Anglican Synod; in this as in other matters he braved the storm, never yielded to theological prejudice, from first to last held out a brotherly hand to the persecuted bishop,
- ↑ For the social ostracism of Colenso, see works already cited; also Cox's Life of Colenso. For the passage from Wilberforce's sermon at the consecration of Colenso, see Rev. Sir G. W. Cox, The Church of England and the Teaching of Bishop Colenso. For Wilberforce's relations to the Colenso case in general, see his Life, by his son, vol. iii, especially pp. 113-126 and 229-231. For Keble's avowal that no Englishman believes in excommunication, ibid., p. 128. For a guarded statement of Dean Stanley's opinion regarding Wilberforce and Newman, see a letter from Dean Church to the Warden of Keble, in Life and Letters of Dean Church, p. 293.
